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Adventures in Ikea lead to new Gaming Table setup

Trying to organize and clean up our condo a bit more, Gill and I agreed on getting some new Ikea shelves that would both look attractive and provide a lot more storage space for loose odds and ends. The results turned out better than I expected:

But after that I realized that our dining room table, once relegated to being a glorified extension to our love seat and generally avoided, might actually find a place in the apartment again, as a gaming table.

Sure it’s just your standard dining room table, but there are a few features here that make it suited for roleplaying. First off, the main chair here is my captain’s chair for Elite Dangerous, where I had mounted a bracket on one of the arms that allowed me to sling my iPad to the side for ease of access and not cluttering up the area in front of me. Here you see it with the 3D Virtual TableTop running.

But there’s a bit more to it than that. The shelving that helps create this GM nook is where our secondary TV is, which is primarily used on the guest futon. But with a quick swivel, this is going to be used by the players as a display screen. Once I get an adapter that will let me run my Chromecast on it, it will be linked with a secondary tablet that the players will use for the virtual table top as well. Theirs will have a Fog of War feature on it, though, and since only one person can really use the tablet at a time, the 20 inch screen will be for the other players to see what’s going on.

And, as a bonus, I could use the same arrangement to show other game-related images, characters, ships, puzzles, what have you.

All in all, it looks like a simple and efficient layout. Hopefully it will survive the test of battle.